Vocational Training and Skill Mismatch

We address our research question on of skills mismatch between workers and jobs in many developed countries has increased the amount of investment into vocational training programs for adults using a correspondence study.

2022-10-16

2023-12-31

Monitor the callback rates corresponding to each application. We will immediately decline the interview to minimize the inconvenience for employers in their hiring process. We will then codify whether an application received a callback or not (i.e., dummy variable equal to one if the application received a callback, and zero otherwise). We will also codify whether an application received an invitation for a job interview (i.e., dummy variable equal to one if the application received an invitation, and zero otherwise).

A callback is a positive personalized phone, or e-mail contact by a potential employer. This is usually a request for an interview, but employers also contact applicants asking for additional documents/information or for a call-back by the applicant.

An invitation is defined as a personalized phone or e-mail contact in which the potential employer expresses interest in conducting an interview.

We plan to send out several fictitious CVs to vacancy job postings on Pôle emploi (the French public employment service), in which we will randomly vary the level of experience and the amount of training, either with more classic education degrees or with vocational-training program for adults, while keeping other characteristics similar.

We define “tight” occupations as occupations in which there are few candidates that have the experience or initial training in the targeted occupation. We will design fictitious CVs of two types of candidates, corresponding to two possible strategies that are aimed at reducing the gap between supply and demand: (1) widening the pool of candidates, by inviting candidates with experience with similar associated skills but in less tight occupations to widen their search towards the job tighter occupations; (2) the retraining of job seekers from less tight occupations through vocational training.

We will first identify 6 tight occupations (for which workers can be trained either with a classic education path, or through a vocational-training program for adults) that will be paired with less tight occupations. Let A be a tight occupation and B a less tight occupation. Three out of the six “type A” occupations are predominantly held by men, while the remaining three are predominantly held by women.

We plan to send out several fictitious CVs to vacancy job postings on Pôle emploi (the French public employment service), in which we will randomly vary the level of experience and the amount of training, either with more classic education degrees or with vocational-training program for adults, while keeping other characteristics similar.

Experimental Design Details
For each occupation, we will design fictitious CVs. We will randomly vary the education block:
Treatment 1: Classic education and experience in a tight occupation (of type A). The job seeker holds a degree corresponding to the classical education for this occupation. In order to account for the specific effect of professional experience, Treatment 1 will be divided into three branches:
Treatment 1.1: Classic education + 4 years of experience
Treatment 1.2: Classic education + 1 year of experience
Treatment 1.3: Classic education + no experience
Treatment 2: Full vocational training. This job seeker is initially trained in another (not tight) occupation (occupation B) but undertakes a long vocational training in occupation A.
Treatment 3: Partial vocational training. This job seeker is initially trained in another another (not tight) occupation (occupation B) but undertakes a short vocational training in occupation A.
Treatment 4: Control group. These profiles will be workers with a few years of experience in occupation B, who apply to vacancies in occupation A without additional vocational training.


We will send 4 resumes to each vacancy in occupation A, rotating the order the different resumes are sent, leaving 1 to 2 days between each application. Among the 4 resumes, our protocol imposes that there should always be a candidate from treatment 1.1 and 1 from treatment 2 (the others are chosen among 1.2, 1.3, 3 and 4). In order to limit the costs related to the writing of CV and to increase comparability between job vacancies, the content of each CV is fixed before the launch of the study. We only modify the candidate’s postal address before sending the application: a postal address is chosen to be near the job offer. By providing an address close to the job location, candidates implicitly signal that they are available for the position. As this criterion of immediate availability/mobility is likely to strongly increase the probability of being called back by an employer, we also added an explicit mention of a recent relocation in 1 CV out of 4. It should be noted that this explicit mention of a recent move concerns only profiles A and B3, for which the comparison is the one that interests us most because it concerns career transition. There are thus 24 resumes in total.

Randomization is done by our office computer. Randomization is used to send 4 CVs to a given job posting (4 characters*6 occupations = 24 different CVs).

CV

No

400 job postings

400 job postings, 1600 CVs

400 for treatments 1.1 and 2.
200 for other treatment arms.

To calculate the minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes, we consider a power of 80% and a significance level of 5%, and the comparison of two arms (say, for example, training vs. no-training) with the same number of employers in each. Assume that the average callback rate is 40 percent. With 400 vacancies in each treatment arm, we can rule out the null hypothesis of no effect if the impact of the training is larger than 9.8 percentage points.